Soundings in Kings

Perspectives and Methods in Contemporary Scholarship

By Klaus-Peter Adam and Mark Leuchter

Publication Year: 2010

The reigning assumptions in 1970s and 1980s scholarship on 1 and 2 Kings, and indeed on all of the Deuteronomistic history, have come under serious question. How can differing views of that history be reconciled? What sources were available to the authors? Should we call them "authors"? How well do the Books of Kings fit into the larger history of which they are a part; just who composed that history, toward what end, and in what context? How do the assumptions of contemporary interpreters influence the answers we give to those questions? In Soundings in Kings, international scholars pursue these and related questions by examining 1 and 2 Kings as an independent work, identifying new methods and models for envisioning the social location of the authors (or redactors) of Kings, the nature of the intended audience or audiences, and the political and rhetorical implications of its construction. Soundings in Kings demonstrates the role of Kings as a cornerstone work within the Hebrew Bible, a crossroads between prophecy, poetry, wisdom, ancestral and national narrative, and ritual instruction.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Preface

...This volume began in a conversation during the 2005 Annual Meeting of
the Society of Biblical Literature in Philadelphia. Following a session
of papers in the Deuteronomistic History section, Klaus-Peter Adam and I
gathered with several other scholars who had presented papers to address
what we recognized to be a growing problem. Namely: there was great disagreement
whether the hypothesis of a Deuteronomistic...

Contributors

Introduction

...F or many years, the book of Kings was taken to be a record of events
in the life of ancient Israel during the period of the monarchy that
revealed in an unencumbered way the deeds of the kings, the complaints
of the prophets, and the intervention of divine forces into political affairs
when punishment was due. In more recent times, though, researchers have
approached the study of the book of Kings from a variety of perspectives that
have moved beyond a basic reading of the text...

Part One: Sources and Transmission

1. Text and Literary History: The Case of 1 Kings 19(MT and LXX)

...The context of my paper is the question of the relationship between text
criticism and redaction criticism: how can text history contribute to a
better knowledge of the literary development of the books of Kings? The discoveries
of the Dead Sea Scrolls profoundly renewed the knowledge of the
most ancient transmission of the biblical text and, in particular, of the place
that the Septuagint...

2. Warfare and Treaty Formulas in the Background of Kings

...About two decades ago, Helga Weippert concluded that the hope “of finding
the key to the overall understanding of the Deuteronomistic History
(DH) [focuses] especially on the Book of Kings.” One of the reasons for
this was that the Deuteronomistic (Dtr) phraseological framework in Kings
was thought to be relatively easy to separate from its source parts...

Part Two: Prophecy and Redaction

...the book of Kings has been considered by German scholarship
to be, to a large extent, the literary contiguous work of a single author, who
by using older source material crafted it around the middle of the sixth century
bce as an integral part of a larger narrative contained within the books
of Deuteronomy to 2 Kings. Noth maintained the theological leitmotif,
which constitutes the internal cohesion...

4. Hezekiah, Manasseh, and Dynastic or Transgenerational Punishment

...This essay addresses the issue of why Dtr blames Manasseh by examining
what Dtr would look like without the passages that blame him. Rather
than revisiting the various well-known redactional proposals for Dtr, we simply
ask the hypothetical question: who would Dtr blame for the two Babylonian
exiles if we remove 2 Kgs 21:10-15, 23:26-27, and 24:3-4 from the
rest of the text...

Part Three: Authors and Audiences

5. The Redaction of Kings and Priestly Authority in Jerusalem

...There has been renewed interest in the compositional history of Kings
as researchers have become increasingly aware of the inadequacies of
Noth’s theory of a Deuteronomistic History to account for this material’s
redactional complexity and ideological diversity...

6. The Sociolinguistic and Rhetorical Implications of the Source Citations in Kings

...Most researchers working with the texts of Kings recognize that the
author of the book did not compose his work ex nihilo, though there
is little consensus regarding the nature of the sources he employed. Scholars
who see Kings as an exilic or Persian period composition more often
see oral tradition and mimetic elements at work...

Response: Kings Resisting Privilege

...The following response to five of these six chapters on aspects of the
book of Kings is offered unashamedly from the perspective of proposals
I have already published in a couple of volumes:1 how far are these essays
convergent with my proposals, how far do they require me to rethink, and
how far do I find that they offer me likely ways forward...

Closing Remarks

...From the sampling of perspectives in the present volume, a few notable
issues emerge in relation to the study of the book of Kings. First
and foremost, it is abundantly clear that Kings, while remaining a parade
example of historiography from the ancient world, is by no means a work
of history. The method of the transfer from sources to finished narrative
and the thematic emphases...

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